Reasons why platonic friends could ruin your relationship

Your hubby and your buddy being too close would bring many feelings to the surface, the topmost being betrayal and hurt in you, the wife or girlfriend, even if there were no actual “sins” in the relationship in question. Except that it would be, still, questionable.

It’s really hard to have this friendship of theirs pop up, whenever and wherever, without somehow bringing up questions.

Your man’s friendship with your girlfriend would be cause for many questions raised and answered after a time of enough hurt, doubt, betrayal and, dare I say, jealousy would still be there.

It would be really hard not to feel neglected in your partner’s life, relegated to a secondary position even though you have been promised the first place as wife, spouse and life partner.

As you struggle from within to make sense of all the ways this semi-illicit relationship is going, you will no doubt be pushed toward confrontation.

Women will handle it differently. Some will confront or go behind the partner’s back to find out what “Elijah” and her gal pal “Elle” are up to, even though all the snooping has never produced hard evidence of an affair.

It could be that their messages are rather things like, “Why are these banking hall lines always so long and tiresome, lol?” But even with much proof about the innocence of this friendship, there are still “territory” issues.

Nowadays we can’t just be the embittered wife or the stoic persevering-good-woman-who holds-down-the-fort while the husband makes merry with his pals.

A lot of the models of relationships are evolving and changing, and maybe it is the way we relate that also somehow allows a guy to have female platonic friends and the wife to have and be in constant touch with her male buddies.

But issues of territory and trust are just not as evolved as the new skins we are all trying for size in our quest to be modern. We find that our livelihoods force us to have to be more modern. Heck, this ability to be flexible is required of us in many important areas.

If your job as a heavy-hitting female executive requires a modicum of after-work mixers as it raises the profile of your employer then you might have to.

So who is to say this is different from your hubby’s position with his gal pals? The solution to dealing with the discomfort of not knowing whether your husband is cheating or not can be setting a rule in your marriage against platonic relationships with your girlfriends...or any other girls at all.

Or it could also be a little more complex. And my sense of this kind of situation overall is that it actually requires a well-planned out approach. Things are not just so simple.

There is friendship itself, the emotional “stuff” that comes up about being the outsider of your own husband’s life and his friendly liaisons with other women, he could be a nurse and they doctors, or his prayer partners at church or sales team members or colleagues at a charity that does “very important things to uplift the well-being of humanity” and so on.

Guess what? Prayers and beating yourself up will only go so far; acceptance could easily be resignation and perseverance, being a supportive friend to your husband may still have a measure of naiveté or silly innocence to it.

And then again maybe both he and his pal respect what you and he have. But feelings have to be felt, sorted analyzed in your attempt to come to terms with the matter.

You need to be okay with that. You need to be okay with more or less regularly reviewing your partnership with your man. We all grow, change and recognize that this brings with it the need to move into new areas.

But as the golden rule in life is “do unto others what you have them do unto you,” the golden rule in relationships tends to be that “no matter what (marriage looks like to others, from the outside, based on what is going on in the home) it is still a contract and understanding that the two of you have.